US Ambassador Disassociated From His Roots

By China Uncensored

Gary locke

Jan. 12,214

A Chinese blogger has posted a mock letter on his blog putting himself in Locke's shoes.

The
mock letter purporting to be from the US Ambassador to China, Mr Gary
Locke to the CCTV journalist, Mr Rui Chenggang is reproduced below:I’m
Chinese, and when President Obama assigned me to be the US Ambassador
to China, he must have thought that my Chinese background could bring a
big turning point to the Sino-US relationship, but unfortunately what
happened was contrary to what he expected, my Chinese background didn’t
bring much good fortune to the Sino-US relationship. I didn’t really expect to be continually criticized by both CCTV and the Guangming Daily.

The
first case was because I took the flight to China in economy class ,
which made Rui Chenggang, the journalist of CCTV, think that Americans
are very poor, so poor that their ambassador had to take economy class
to travel. So I explained that all American officials take economy class
to go on business, a statement that Rui refused to believe, so he kept
on quipping me about it on his microblog.

Maybe the journalist
was familiar with the custom of Chinese leaders to take business class
for travel with five bodyguards beside them, but what I want to tell Rui
is that your leaders are wasting the tax-payers money; then
reconsidering it, I thought that Rui might still fail to understand me.
So I wanted to tell him, we Americans are not poor, but China always
likes to lend money to America, so I didn’t say it. Anyway, I was afraid
that he would not understand it. I really don’t know what happened with
Rui.

Then, after I took a taxi to the embassy and sent my child
to the school for kids of common Chinese migrant workers, to my
surprise, this even annoyed a journalist, Xiang Xiaodong, who wrote an
essay criticizing me in the Guangming Daily, saying that I wanted to
disassociate myself from Chinese customs.

I suppose that this
journalist might be very familiar with the situation of Comrade Xu or
Comrade Zhou who had five cars driving along to protect him, and the
fact that the leader had the right to knock down passers-by while
driving, and the news that one leader slept with 90 ladies, and he might
not even be ashamed if he happened to know that one of those ladies is a
close relative of his. On the contrary, he might be proud of his
relative as she slept with a 'leader’. That might be the reason why
those Chinese journalists are not familiar with the fact that a leader
can be very thrifty. It might be because they got familiar with the
leader being a bully, that they are not used to being respected, for you
have to be a sadist rather than a masochist, otherwise they will not
respect you.

When I was young, my grandfather told me that you
should remember your roots are in China, you are a Chinese. But now, I
realized that my roots must be completely rotten.

I am wondering,
what is really happening to China - my roots - if being thrifty by an
official can be divisive; do you really expect me to be as luxurious and
bad as Mr Xu (or Comrade Xu?) to make my Chinese compatriots happy; are
you, my Chinese compatriots, really masochistic?

Sending my kids
to the common school for Chinese migrant workers can annoy Chinese
people, however, while many Chinese bigwigs send their children to the
most expensive American schools, no Americans will be surprised, because
they all know all those corrupted bigwigs are filthy rich.

In
the view of Americans people are equal, nobody would want to be superior
to others merely because his or her father was well known.

Even
though I have been in China for only one month, there are a lot of
things I just can’t understand, for example, many kids who get into
trouble, get off the hook merely because they mention their father’s
name.

This situation would never happen in America, as no
American child would make their living merely depending on the fame of
their parents. Americans can only depend on their government if they are
in trouble overseas, for example, when caught in a natural disaster,
they would say "I am an American", just like those Chinese people who
would boast mentioning their parents. Because, they know that the
American government would protect its people.

For example, last
year, two Chinese-American female reporters were detained by North
Korea, it was former American president Bill Clinton himself, who flew
to North Korean to rescue them, which is the strength of the American
system.

These are my thoughts after being in China for one month, and my reply to all those criticisms of me.

1 comment:

It is sad I have just come across this article; I live in Washington State, USA, where I lived for many years while Gary Locke, the Ambassador, did an excellent job first as County Executive and then Governor (for two terms) of the State of Washington. Everyone knew him as being unbiased; everyone also knew that both he and his wife had relatives that still lived in China.

There may be many reasons Gary Locke has acted as he has during his term as ambassador.